4 Cold Cases Everyone Gave Up On… Until Recently Got Solved | True Crime Documentary

Somewhere in America right now, there is an unsolved murder. The file exists, the evidence exists, the killer exists—breathing, walking around, living a life they were never supposed to have. Detectives move on, families exhaust themselves grieving, the years stack up, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the case goes cold. Most of those stories don’t have endings. These four do.

In 2025, forensic advancements and genetic genealogy testing solved dozens of cases that the system had quietly abandoned, and 2026 is already proving that momentum isn’t slowing down. If anything, the walls are closing in faster. Today, four murders, four victims who deserved better, four killers who believed that enough time would protect them. It didn’t.

Sarah Greer, May 23rd, 1982. Sarah left her friend’s house that afternoon to walk downtown. It was the kind of thing kids did back then, no reason for alarm, no reason for anyone to worry. She never made it. The following morning, a fireman heading home after his shift found her body. She had been raped, strangled with her own shorts, and dragged down an alleyway to a secluded area behind a fence near an apartment block. She was 13 years old.

The investigation that followed was hampered from the start. This was 1982; forensic technology was primitive by today’s standards, and without it, detectives had very little to work with. For over two decades, Sarah’s case gathered dust. No arrests, no answers, just silence. Then, in 2003, a criminalist with the California Department of Justice managed to develop a DNA profile from biological material recovered from Sarah’s underwear. It was a breakthrough, except the profile didn’t match anyone in the database. The lead went nowhere. 18 more years passed.

In 2021, the Cloverdale PD made a decision. They brought in a private investigator and reached out to the FBI, specifically for access to genetic genealogy databases that local law enforcement couldn’t touch. Slowly, methodically, investigators began narrowing the field. The suspect pool eventually closed in on four brothers. Surveillance was set up. Patience became the weapon. Then, one of the brothers discarded a cigarette butt. That was enough. DNA testing confirmed it: a match to the biological material found on Sarah’s clothing four decades earlier.

In July 2024, 64-year-old James Unic was arrested at his home in Willows, California. He was charged with murder, rape, kidnapping, and lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14. At trial, Unic took the stand in his own defense.

“The 13-year-old had propositioned him.”

“What happened between them was consensual.”

“That someone else must have attacked her afterward.”

The jury deliberated for 2 hours. In February 2026, James Unic was found guilty on all counts. He is scheduled to be sentenced in April of this year. Sarah Greer was 13 years old. She walked downtown one afternoon and never came back. It took the world 44 years to make that right.

Bryant Keith Bates, November 15th, 1988. Bryant left his home in North East Lake that morning to attend a friend’s funeral. He never came back. His family reported him missing shortly after, and almost immediately, the people who knew him best—his friends, his family—voiced what investigators were quietly beginning to suspect: Bryant hadn’t just disappeared; something had happened to him, something violent. But there was no evidence, no leads, nobody—just a young man who had walked out of his house one November morning and vanished.

16 years passed. In November 2004, an exterminator working on a rental property in Southeast Lake made a discovery that stopped him cold. Inside a crawl space beneath the home, tucked inside a coal bin, a human skeleton. The remains were sent to the Jefferson County Coroner Medical Examiner’s Office, where a forensic pathologist and forensic anthropologist got to work. Their findings painted a partial picture: the skeleton belonged to a man approximately 5′ 10″ tall, of African descent, aged somewhere between 17 and 30. Fragments of clothing were recovered alongside the bones: plaid trousers, argyle socks, a white and blue shirt, a yellow metal chain necklace, a Coca-Cola branded watch, and a gunshot wound to the head. But who he was, that remained a mystery for years. The remains sat unidentified.

In 2015, the details were entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Still nothing. 3 years later, a bone sample was submitted for DNA analysis to the University of Texas Center for Human Identification. The profile was entered into the system, but no match was found. A second bone sample was then sent to Othram Inc., a genetic genealogy company. It sat waiting. Finally, in 2025, the sample was tested, and investigators were given something they hadn’t had in nearly 4 decades: a direction.

In February 2026, 38 years after Bryant Keith Bates left home to attend a funeral, investigators made it official: the remains discovered beneath that Birmingham house were his. DNA from his immediate family members confirmed it. Bryant has finally been found, but his story isn’t finished. Detectives are still actively investigating his murder, and the questions surrounding what happened to him that November day remain unanswered. If you have any information about Bryant’s death, contact the Birmingham PD Homicide Unit at 205-254-1764.

Marisella Rocher, July 18th, 1980. A body was discovered in the parking lot of Westlake High School in Westlake, California. The scene was so disturbing that responding officers initially mistook her for a mannequin. She had been raped, stabbed nearly 29 times, strangled, and she had fought back. Defensive wounds covered her hands and arms, and beneath her fingernails, investigators recovered the perpetrator’s DNA. She had been murdered elsewhere and dumped there in the early morning hours, killed just hours before she was found. She was also pregnant.

For decades, nobody knew her name. Investigators described her as a young woman with black hair, blonde dyed ends, brown eyes, and pierced ears. She had a birth mark on her face, a mole beneath her left index finger, scars on her left knee, and an episiotomy scar—evidence that she had given birth before. Authorities theorized she may have been hitchhiking and was taken from Los Angeles, Kern, or Ventura County. She was entered into the system as Ventura County Jane Doe, and there she remained.

Then in 2012, something shifted. Her case was linked to that of Kern County Jane Doe number five, another unidentified young woman found dead in an almond orchard in Delano, California on July 14th, 1980, just 4 days earlier. She too had been raped and stabbed multiple times. The similarities were impossible to ignore. Kern County Jane Doe number five had already been connected to a man named Wilson Chouest back in 2008 through DNA. Chouest was already serving a life sentence for kidnapping, robbery, and rape committed between August and September of 1980. But without a name for the victim, Kern County had declined to pursue charges.

4 years later, DNA testing of both victims’ rape kits confirmed what investigators suspected: the same man had killed both women. Charges were finally filed. Chouest was transferred to Ventura County and charged with three counts of…

…work. How the Arlington PD had no specific cold case unit, how newer investigations always took priority. Eddings, who had once worked as a forensic analyst herself, saw an opportunity. She proposed that a small group of her students assist local police by working through old case files. It was a win-win: the students got real-world experience, the department got fresh eyes on cases that had been untouched for decades.

The students were handed boxes: case files, witness statements, lab reports, crime scene photographs. They went through everything methodically, carefully, looking for anything that might have been missed. And they found something. One name kept appearing in the original investigator’s notes—quietly, repeatedly. The students flagged it and asked detectives a simple question:

“Had this woman ever been formally interviewed? Had her DNA or fingerprints ever been taken?”

That question sent detectives back into the file. What they found there stopped them cold. The woman had been interviewed twice, once in 1991 and again in 1993. Two men had separately come forward in those years to tell authorities that she had confessed to Cynthia’s murder. Her name was Janie Perkins.

Reading further, detectives uncovered the motive. One of those men had been dating Perkins at the time of the murder, until he met Cynthia. He ended things with Perkins to pursue a relationship with her. By all accounts, it had sent Perkins into a rage. She had no alibi for the night of the murder. She had failed two separate polygraph tests, and yet no arrest had ever been made, because polygraph results are inadmissible in court and, without forensic evidence physically tying Perkins to the scene, prosecutors had nothing solid enough to move forward with in 1993.

Until now.

On November 6th, 2025, Janie Perkins, now 63 years old, was arrested for the murder of Cynthia Gonzalez. Cynthia’s daughter, Jessica, was 6 years old when her mother was killed. 34 years later, she spoke about the students whose curiosity had changed everything:

“I am so grateful for this program, and so proud of these students at UTA, and so thankful for the time they have spent and the effort they put into this case.”

The same class of students is now working on two more cold cases. Four victims, four families, four decades—in some cases, more—of silence, grief, and unanswered questions. Sarah Greer never made it downtown. Bryant Keith Bates never made it home from a funeral. Marisella Rocher left behind a 2-year-old daughter and a sister who never stopped waiting. Cynthia Gonzalez left behind a 6-year-old girl who grew up without her mother.

These weren’t just cold cases; they were people, and for far too long, the world moved on without them. But here’s what 2025 and 2026 have made undeniably clear: science is catching up to the past. Genetic genealogy is reaching back into decades-old evidence and pulling out answers that no one thought were still there. And in some cases, it isn’t even cutting-edge technology doing the heavy lifting; sometimes it’s a professor with an idea, a student with fresh eyes, a cigarette butt left on a sidewalk. Justice, it turns out, is patient.